KEY POINTS:
The Starship hospital in Auckland has opened a second heart theatre to cope with the rising need to perform life-saving surgery on babies like Ava Tremain.
Ava was born five weeks premature on August 12. A scan during pregnancy revealed heart problems, but her condition was not fully diagnosed until after she was born.
She had a hole in the heart and hypo-plastic left heart, a condition in which the left side of the heart that pumps blood out to the body is underdeveloped. Nothing could be done for babies with the fatal condition until the mid-1990s, when an operation was devised.
It involves rearranging blood vessels and implanting an artificial one. The right side of the heart is reconnected to pump blood out to the body instead of to the lungs. A 3.5mm-diameter plastic tube is placed to take some blood from an artery in the upper right arm to the blood vessels connected to thelungs.
As well as saving the baby concerned, the treatment commits the hospital to two further operations as the child grows. Ultimately the body's big veins, which return blood to the heart, are connected to the lungs, which can by then draw blood through without the usual pumping help of the heart.
In New Zealand, 400 to 500 babies are born each year with heart defects. Between 350 and 400 of them have surgery. Five to 10 a year are born with hypo-plastic left heart.
Ava underwent a nine-hour operation when she was five days old and will have another at 4 months. She is still in hospital.
It has been a distressing time for her parents, Heidi and Carl, of Milford on the North Shore, but they know Ava is in the best place.
Mrs Tremain, who is in hospital with her baby, said yesterday that her daughter was gaining weight, but it was thought she had two blood clots in her heart and that she had had two brain bleeds.
Dr Kirsten Finucane, the clinical head of the Starship's cardiac surgery unit, which serves all of New Zealand plus the Pacific islands, said the increasing birth rate had contributed to a small rise in the demand for child and teenage heart surgery and the incidence of congenital heart defects was rising only slightly.
In a decade, the survival rate had increased to 85-90 per cent, from 50-67 per cent, meaning more patients needed subsequent operations.
Reasons for the improvement included safer surgical equipment and diagnosis during pregnancy.
The new theatre was built during the extensions opened in 2003. It was used for other surgery before its conversion to heart surgery with $100,000 of equipment financed by the Starship Foundation with money from Barfoot & Thompson.
The unit can now handle up to 15 operations a week, compared with nine before the second theatre became available.
